One of the most wonderful happenings of research is finding one’s subject in unexpected places. The idea of “social mechanics” is to be found in the philosophy of law of Rudolf von Jhering (22 August 1818 – 17 September 1892). In the United States, Jhering most famous work was in its English translation. Published in 1914, Law as a Means to an End (published in translation in 1914) had the following central arguments. The first was that there was no “natural contract.” This was contrary to the jurisprudence of William Blackstone, which posited (like many others) the existence of an original contract as one of the conditions of modern society. Jhering was reacting against a very established natural law tradition. Conversely, Jhering underscored that law was simply the most convenient organization found by man. Morality and personhood were outside of law. It was not that law was amoral. It was that morality was outside of law. Law had no justification outside that it was convenient and that it provided a social function for society.

I will have a response to all of my Zilsel friends shortly.It will be titled “Hunting for the Unicorn: Further Thoughts on Science and the Dissenting Sciences”

*Digression Begins Here*

One of my consistent complaints about our understanding of nineteenth century social theory in the United States is that there is little sustained efforts on these topics due to the problem of relevance. My contention was (now some years ago in “The Nineteenth Century Problem“) that our understanding of nineteenth century American intellectual history (as very narrowly defined by the history of ideas, so as to not include the history of social movements or ideologies) was hampered by the issue of relevance. We have a basic problem of knowing so little about nineteenth century social theory that we must resort to boot-strapping mechanisms.

Thus, historians of ideas and historians of science would like to think that they can study anything they’d like. But this is simply not true. I am discussing this since many issues were addressed with my Zilsel friends last week. One was the issue of justification of case studies and of topics for analysis. My respondent (the extremely smart and gracious Volny Fages , who throughout put up with my bad manners) questioned why I justified my attention to the pseudosciences and even my choice of case studies.

The “boar” of the title refers to Martin Luther and his heresy, referring to the famous bull of Pope Leo X. In the early modern world, the boar stood for the problem of heresy in the faithful church.

I. The “World’s Most Controversial Anthropologist”

Napoleon Chagnon has been christened the “world’s most controversial anthropologist” by the New York Times. Chagnon enjoys the label, it is on his faculty web site. Why is he the world’s most controversial anthropologist? I give two reasons. 1) in a book published in 2000, “Darkness in El Dorado,” he was accused with James Neel, a well-regarded epidemiologist, of exacerbating a measles outbreak in order to test the fitness of tribes of Yanomami in Northern Brazil and Southern Venezuela. These charges, offered by a journalist, were dismissed by the American Anthropological Association. 2) his linking of social status, with reproductive success or of cultural success with biological success. Chagnon argued, as had his adviser and mentor the geneticist and epidemiologist Jim Neel in the 1970s and 1980 (most explicitly in “On Being Headman” in 1980) that those Yanomami villagers who were good at warfare, good at killing had high social status. Aggression and warlike behavior (through mechanisms not really explained) have become social virtues due to their biological benefits. As a result of their high social status, they enjoyed reproductive success. They had more children than villagers less adept at warfare. Aggression persists, moreover, because it is evolutionarily adaptive and it is the result of human beings acting rationally, in the pursuit of their own self-interest as well as those of their kin.

My friends at Zilsel have invited me to speak on a topic which I have been working on for quite some time, through my various researches in biosocial anthropology and human behavioral ecology, behavior genetics and public choice economics (in the work of Gordon Tullock especially) the “dissenting sciences.” I keep changing my mind on what to call them, having referred to them as “heterodox” and “pariah” sciences.

I am a bit in a muddle and I have decided to write my way out of this confusion. I have submitted two introductions to introduce my case studies. This is a version of those introductions.

Writing on the Pseudosciences

I do this because our field not only suffers from the privacy of criticism but also the privacy of ideas. As Will has written about many times, historians of science are too concerned with only publishing their very polished thoughts. This means that much of the knowledge of the profession is hidden from public view. This behavior is elitist.

And now everyone reading this hopefully has a better sense of my motivations. My thoughts on pseudoscience are a bit of a muddle, I am using this blog as a way to puzzle out this muddle, as a prelude to puzzling out some of my confusions in a talk on Tuesday. I am deliberately not holding back my unpolished thoughts in the hopes that others will do so. (more…)

In my previous post on the 19th century political economist Henry C. CareyI underscored some of his methodological suppositions (his Newtonianism, his Baconianism and his dependence upon William Whewell). I made two further points: first, that Carey’s system-building and his emphasis on man and nature being under the rule of law was typically of social theory penned during the nineteenth century. One finds the same flavor of contention in the work of John William Draper and Henry Buckle, where both authors attempted to bring diverse sorts of information ranging from facts concerning the course of civilization to the laws and regularities of human psychology under one kind of generality, where facts and the laws which they illustrated were exemplars of a well-ordered universe. This is more or less the purpose too of later sociological reasoning.

Depending upon the writer involved, this mammoth reductionism and systems-building, with its consequent determinism, was to differing degrees rhetorical, heuristic, deadly serious, and inconsistent. As importantly, these efforts at system-building and reduction often obscures digressions and departures which form intriguing sub-arguments and sub-systems.

This is my first post for my new blog, Vice Versa. In this post I expand on a project I began at EWP—a reconstruction of the languages of the inquiry into nature and society from Henry Buckle to the work of E. O. Wilson. At EWP, I detailed how socio-biology was in reality a number of related inquiries in constellation with distinct genealogies, methodologies, worldviews and rules of evidence. Here, I interrogate Robin Fox’s claim to the neologism of “biosocial” to describe his inquiry. Rather than take Fox at his word that his biosocial science is a unique invention, I trace the origins of the term to turn of the century discussions of biological determinism in Italian criminology and in the work of education reformer Maria Montessori.

Once there, I then follow biosocial to its embedding within behaviorist psychology and finally within post-war discussions of racial prejudice. My examination of the term biosocial is not exhaustive—Kingsley Davis used it to define his view of man as an evolved social organism—but I use a case study approach to emphasize how biosocial has always been used to highlight the importance of the social as well as the environmental and to interrogate the boundary between the biological and the natural. Much like social selection, biosocial has been utilized since the origins of the social sciences to contend with deterministic explanations.

Robin Fox in his Biosocial Anthropology (1975) makes something of the neologism of ‘biosocial’ to explain his community’s effort into making social inquiries like anthropology both scientific and against relativism. Biosocial anthropology was preferable to ‘social biology’ as practiced in the UK since the latter had been historically associated with eugenics. According to Fox, biosocial was a perfect novel term to describe his inquiry into the boundary between nature and society. To this day, and partially because of this shift in designation, social biology and biosocial science have remained distinct communities separated by the Atlantic (although social biology is much more demographic in focus.)

I remained suspicious of Fox’s claim for the novelty of this term and went about further research. It appears that there was such a thing as biosocial science prior to Fox. As importantly, its meaning shifted according to the bearer and according to then-forming disciplines. Bio-social…

Henry C. Carey (December 15, 1793 – October 13, 1879) was an economist from Philadelphia whose The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial(1851) has attracted considerable attention for his critique of Ricardian and Malthusian economics. Like Daniel Raymond (1786–1849, who was the first sustained critic of Adam Smith, Thomas R. Malthus and David Ricardo), Carey found in particular Malthus and Ricardo’s laissez-faire outlook and quietism concerning class conflicts, and the unequal distribution of wealth between social classes factually incorrect and morally dubious. Instead, according to Jeffrey P. Sklansky in The Soul’s Economy (2002), Carey contended that “capitalist development naturally leads to class harmony rather than strife and that the free growth of market relations would result in the breakdown of class distinctions altogether, whether between master and slave or between employer and employee…” (80).

UPDATE: It has occurred to me that my two part argument—leveling a criticism of the philosophers’ portrayal of biosocial anthropology as censure-worthy at the expense of an understanding of the complexity of its ideas and normalizing biosocial anthropology in post-war ideas by re-categorizing it as philosophical anthropology—that I focused less on ideas and their genealogies (especially the Gellner bits) than was satisfactory. Thus, quite soon, I will analyze in depth Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger’sThe Imperial Animal (1971) as both philosophical anthropology AND as an outgrowth of the re-configuration of the social sciences in the US and the UK after the Second World War. Hopefully, by the time of my review of Joel Isaac’sWorking Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (2013) my views on post-war, Cold War American and UK social sciences will be reasonably apparent.

In a previous post, I attempted a taxonomy of post-war inquiries which interrogated the connections between the biological and social sciences in various post-war intellectual communities. Bio-social anthropology, biosocial anthropology, sociobiology and social biology were loosely defined. Part of the challenge of discussing these (mostly) post-war inquiries is in going beyond the fraught discussions over the extent that any or all of these inquiries engage in biological reductionism and biological determinism.

What is needed more is a discussion of the ideas themselves and their genealogies and, by extension, their connections to broader themes in post-war and Cold War sciences. The ideas themselves are quite complicated, and many philosophers of science, such as Mario Bunge (though much of his work is among my favorites in philosophy of science), reduce them to caricatures (intelligent distortions—but reductions which worry about their societal implications and evil intent). On a philosophical and ethical level, these ideas are troublesome and distortions—but they are with us and have been with us for some time. One can talk about the ideational content of (say) public choice theory, without the merits of its practical application. It seems impossible to talk about Hayek or Keynes outside of their virtues as policy, but this must change as well.

Biosocial anthropology, as noted in the last post, is, especially in the works of Robin Fox, part of a philosophical and social science critique against relativism in the social sciences as well as in epistemology. Such a critique draws strength from the methodological writings of Karl Popper (previously mentioned), but even more so from Ernest Gellner. Gellner is the subject of a remarkable biography by John A. Hall (that is not without its problems, and will be reviewed here shortly). Fox’s appropriation of Gellner’s ideas also points to a rather bifurcated legacy on the part of this diverse social thinker: as a philosophical critic and anthropologist and as a theorist of nationalism. Mary Douglas, whose diverse works have never been much understood by anthropologists, but whose ideas have been appropriated by diverse other fields, was deeply scornful of Gellner’s books on nationalism (as evidenced by her oral history with Alan Macfarlane). Fox seems to prefer Gellner the philosopher to Gellner the theorist of nationalism. Hall, valiantly tries to unify them. Such an account is incredibly useful, but at odds with my understanding of Gellner.

This particular post focuses on biosocial anthropology, sociobiology, social biology and bio-social science. Biosocial anthropology is a very specific intellectual community which has self-ordered around the theoretical and evidentiary contributions of Napoleon Chagnon, William Irons, Lee Cronk, and my personal favorite for heterogeneity and provocation, Robin Fox. This community has always traveled in different circles than those of sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson. Biosocial anthropology is also distinct in emphasis from social biology.

I will also detail the bio-social perspective of Kingsley Davis, which in many ways anticipated the conceptual innovations of biosocial anthropology, but whose bio-social science is unknown. His work is an exercise in “anti-reductionism” (my term)—arguing instead for the distinctiveness of human social evolution as opposed to the development of beings in nature.

John William Draper’s own work is astonishingly particular to modern readers. He and Henry Buckle rigorously examined how mental progress was conditioned by material forces. They did so by differentiating between two fundamental realms of law. Buckle observed, “on the one hand, we have the human mind obeying the laws of its own existence, and, when uncontrolled by external agents, developing itself according to the conditions of its organization. On the other hand, we have what is called Nature, obeying likewise its laws ; but incessantly coming into contact with the minds of men, exciting their passions, stimulating their intellect, and therefore giving to their actions a direction which they would not have taken without such disturbance.Thus we have man modifying nature, and nature modifying man; while out of this reciprocal modification all events must necessarily spring” (History of Civilization in England, 18-19).

The entire purpose of his History of Civilization in England was to understand and to describe the laws of this “double modification” and their connections. The discovery of these kinds of regularities was important moreover because it provided for free will and allowed for effective social legislation. Effective social legislation required that there be a “human nature” but that this human nature be not directed by Providence or determinism, since that would render the basic moral assumptions of existing criminal codes null.